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Episode 677: Type-In Games
🕑 Added 2025-03-10 11:00:12 +0000 UTCKevin: If you listen to this podcast, you’re probably well-versed in the many, many formats video games have been and continue to be distributed in: digital downloads, cartridges, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, floppy disks, cassette tapes, even vinyl. But good old-fashioned paper has served as a way to distribute game programs since the 1960s, and that brings us to today’s topic: type-in games.
If you had access to a computer (or even some game consoles) and some way to save and load programs, chances are you could find type-in listings for it. These were written by enthusiasts and occasionally professional developers, and published in books, magazines, and newsletters, just waiting for someone to spend the time to type them in, try them out, and maybe even to modify the program themselves. Given the sheer number of games distributed this way, there’s quite a few that have been trapped as ink on paper for decades, a situation that preservationists have been trying to change. And joining me to talk about these programs are two such people: Dustin “Hubz” Hubbard, who runs the website Gaming Alexandria, and Ozidual, who has really spearheaded Gaming Alexandria’s “Type-In Taskforce” initiative to bring these nearly lost programs back to life. Expect a lot of talk about Famicom type-ins, preservation tools and Star Trek as we highlight what makes these programs so cool and this work so rewarding.
Edits by Greg Leahy; art by Amanda Neipris
08:18 - "Funeral March of a Marionette" (Bally BASIC ver. by George Moses)
19:51 - xyce: "1982 6851" (C64 SID)
31:25 - "A Hard Day's Night" (Bally BASIC ver. by George Moses)
42:21 - Kirby Super Star: Battle Windows
54:23 - Secret of Mana (SNES): The Oracle
1:07:17 - Power Drift (MSX): Like the Wind
1:18:01 - ZX Freeq: "Star Trek 50th Anniversary Demo" (ZX Spectrum 48/128k)
Closing - "Sinfonica to Cantata No. 29" (Bally BASIC ver. by George Moses)
Comments
Diamond Feit
I HAD THAT ISSUE OF MAD AND TRIED TO TYPE ALL THAT DATA IN BUT I DID IT WRONG
David Gaxiola
As a kid, I typed in a variety of BASIC programs for my Atari 800 from listings in Antic magazine. I remember a couple of early ones like a Frogger clone except you played as a chicken (similar to the Activision game Freeway) and a Death Star trench run game that took a long time to initialize and was fairly slow afterwards. Antic included short programs called TYPO and later TYPO II that would perform per-line checksums so you could validate typing it correctly before moving on. Compute! magazine was also well known for including code listings for various micros. Even Mad Magazine got in on it! There was a code listing that would draw Alfred E. Neuman on screen and you would substitute code depending on which computer you had while the bulk of the listing was shared plotting data: https://atariprojects.org/2018/09/11/mad-magazine-basic-program-10-15-mins/
Brian Pitt
I was a little young for this era of gaming but I have fond memories of trying to get a mammoth-hunting type-in game to work (and learning why the program numbered lines in multiples of ten when I, in my 8-year-old wisdom, figured I'd just do sequential numbers and then realize I had skipped a line)
John Simon
My local library had a few of these usborne books (https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books) one of which described a Zork style text game and took you through the command parsers and level designs. Really cool, but infuriating how much effort it takes to build something that’s “nice for 30 minutes or so”
Andrew O.
Such a cool project and I appreciate the efforts to preserve these games. I'd contribute myself, but after coding for work all day I'm too burned out for any side projects.
thatcamjones
I used to consume books of BASIC games from my local library as though they were oxygen in the 80’s. It really felt like having something magic in my hands. Thanks for talking in depth about something a lot of folks never got to experience.
Kevin Bunch
According to the editor, that song was picked because Hiromichi Tanaka got his start with Family BASIC!
Typhoon Jim
did you put the secret of mana song in there simply because it kicks ass
G
Good gosh 😧… I was just reading an older paperback book on typing in programs This is very well-timed!
